The sword he had acquired was heavy in the pommel, making it poorly balanced, but it was just right for smacking the butt of it into the nose of the second man. The third man rushed in, tackling Jaykun to the rocky sand. Jaykun rolled with the weight of the man until his enemy was beneath him. Jaykun straddled the man’s chest and brought the pommel of the sword down hard on his nose, breaking it and stunning him all at once. Then Jaykun jammed the heel of his free palm up under the man’s chin, pushing his head back and opening his neck to the swipe of Jaykun’s blade.

Blood erupted from the man’s cut throat and splashed against Jaykun’s clothing. Not that he cared. He was more concerned with the two remaining men, who had since thrown off the effects of his stunning blows and were now rushing him as a single force, tackling him back onto the sand. He felt his shoulder wrench under the impact, but he literally shrugged the sensation of it off. His heavy—bottomed sword, however, went flying from his hand.

He wrestled for control of the situation, trying to throw off the weight of two heavy bodies sitting on his chest and legs. He arched his back hard, twisted every way he could think of, but the fact was, he was wrung out. After being run through the heart and then suffering his nightly torment, there was almost nothing left inside him. Oh, he was immortal, but he felt every single solitary second of that immortality in one way or another. Tonight it was in the injuries he had been forced to sustain. They weakened him, made him vulnerable. And gods help him if by some rare chance one of these men was wielding a god—made weapon. All it would take was a simple beheading by one such weapon and that would be the end of him. Although, sometimes…at some very low times…he wondered if that wouldn’t be for the better. It would certainly end the torment he suffered night after night. But who was to say he would not face an entirely new torment should he end up in the eight hells? At least alive there was some reprieve.

And so he fought. Oh, how he fought. He kicked and snarled, threw the both of them off himself, but they quickly pinned him down again. Still, he did not go down easy. The two men were panting hard as they held him down, their faces battered from where he had managed to punch them, their bodies bruised likewise.

“Stay down, trega!” the one nearest his head snarled at him, calling him what the Krizans called foreigners to their lands. The Krizan on Jaykun’s chest was built for sheer brute strength. There was no grace to him, merely muscle and ferocity. His bottom canine teeth, as with all Krizans, tusked up over his upper lip, and they were capped in a silvery metal that gleamed in the moonlight. The Krizans liked to adorn their prominent teeth in all manner of ways, but the warriors preferred to keep them sharp to make the men appear more vicious. A Krizan was not above biting his enemy.

His nose was flat, his nostrils wide. He looked a great deal like one of the morari Jaykun had seen on the jetty. He had on a sealskin hat, the floppy ends of it hanging over his ears.

“So, trega, you fall to Lukan! You are perhaps not so formidable after all!” he said in his guttural, heavily accented voice.

“I presume you are Lukan?” Jaykun said dryly. He had relaxed, saving his strength for an opening when it came.

“Lukan! Greatest of all the mighty Krizan warriors!”

“Your mighty warriors looked more like sleepy women out on that battlefield today,” Jaykun said.

The Krizan roared in outrage, spittle flying from his lips. “The demon trega leaders use sorcery to win their battles! Evil trickery!”

“I hate to break it to you, but we don’t have any mages with us at present. The most dangerous things we have along those lines are the mem healers. Not very dangerous at all, I’m afraid.”

“You are a liar, trega! All trega are liars and demons!” He hissed past his plump lips. “Now we will disembowel you and cut you into little pieces, painting a picture with you on the beach for the other trega to find in the morning.”

So they didn’t realize he was the trega leader. That was perhaps a good thing, Jaykun thought. Otherwise, they would have tried to kill him immediately, using him as some sort of trophy or whatever it was the Krizans liked to do to the leaders of an enemy force.

“Why don’t you all just give up already? We’re going to come over your walls tomorrow, whether you like it or not. No one else has to die if you simply open the gates.”

“We would rather die than let trega like you into our city, where you will kill our children and defile our women.”

“Trust me, we don’t want anything to do with your women,” Jaykun said. To be blunt, Krizan women were twice as ugly as their hideous male counterparts.

“Again he lies,” the second warrior said. “Who wouldn’t want the beauty of a Krizan warrior woman? Kill him. His words irritate my ears.”

“Yes, do get on with it,” Jaykun said with a sigh.

His blasé tone enraged the Krizan warrior. He balled up his fist and punched it dead—on into Jaykun’s face. And it hurt. There was no two ways about it. Krizan warriors were definitely strong, if not exactly bright. Had they been bright, they would have learned how to fight on land…seeing as how they lived on land and not on the ocean.

The Krizan pulled a dagger from his boot and reared back to plunge it into Jaykun’s chest.

Oh no. Not that again, Jaykun vowed to himself. He wrenched a hand free somehow, surprising his over—arrogant attackers and reached to catch the downward plunge, his hand grabbing the meaty forearm of the warrior and stopping the dagger dead in the air. The warrior seemed as though he couldn’t believe his eyes for a second, couldn’t believe that Jaykun had the strength to counteract his strike.

The two struggled for several long moments, the warrior pushing down, Jaykun staving off.

Then the softest little sound slid through the air. Like a musical note, only gentler and more beautiful. The Krizan warriors froze, and to Jaykun’s surprise, all the strength behind the dagger was gone. Instead the men were suddenly tripping over themselves to withdraw.

“Prava!” one said to the other, their eyes wide. Both men scrambled off Jaykun, turned, and ran. They were trying to run so fast that they fell more than once.

Jaykun sat up, at a complete loss to explain what had just happened.

Then he heard it again. That soft, lilting note. Like a laugh. The sweetest, most singsongy laugh he’d ever heard.

He got to his feet and peered out into the moonlit darkness. That was when he saw a figure standing there in the moonlight. A woman. She was slight of build, tall but slim. She had long hair that whipped around her body in the ocean breeze. He could not tell what color it was, only that it was dark. It fell all the way to the backs of her knees. It could cover her entire body, he found himself thinking. And a good thing too, for she was completely naked.